Urban Threads Tallahassee

Posted on December 07, 2011 by Admin
Urban Threads Tallahassee

Urban Threads Tallahassee

Albert Soboul began his career as a pupil of Georges Lefebvre, whose Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution dominated the discussion of the event among historians for decades since his publishing of The Coming of the French Revolution in 1947. Soboul maintained that one could only understand and explain the French Revolution as a class struggle, in which the bourgeoisie, backed by the force of the lower classes, gained power from the aristocracy, overthrew the old order, and restructured the state to fit its own interests.

The French Revolution Was a War Between the Classes

Soboul believed the events of the French Revolution could have only happened as part of a war between the classes; Soboul did not accept the idea that the Revolution consisted merely of a series of disconnected events without real meaning. He argued that the Revolution could not simply amount to a straightforward conflict between the old dominant force of the aristocracy and the emergent power of the bourgeoisie.

The masses of the cities and the peasants also involved themselves in the revolution. Their actions proved decisive in taking down the Old Regime and assuring the victory of the bourgeoisie. The peasant revolution of 1789 and the uprising of the Parisian masses at the Bastille in July 1789 as well as the mass uprisings in 1792 and again in 1793-1794 tipped the balance of forces against the government and the aristocracy. Soboul believed that the bourgeois could not have destroyed the old order without the assistance of the masses.